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Training and education

Lucia Michielin, currently working for the Software Sustainability Institute, tells us about the Edinburgh Carpentries effort and a networking event to be held on the 24th of May.

Edinburgh Carpentries, a new training initiative, was launched on September 2018 at the University of Edinburgh in collaboration with the Software Sustainability Institute. Since then the initiative has started to propagate to other institutes in the Edinburgh area, eg Heriot Watt University. Edinburgh Carpentries uses and leverages teaching materials and infrastructure from The Carpentries (carpentries.org) .

Please visit us at Booth A-1453 at ISC 2019 in Frankfurt and vote us as your favourite team!

In the international ISC Student Cluster Competition (SCC), student teams build small clusters of different architectures to achieve the highest performance by running a series of applications and benchmarks under 3kW peak power limitation. The competition will be held in June in Frankfurt (Germany) as an integral part of the ISC High Performance Conference and Exhibition, and TeamEPCC will be there.

One of the benefits of teaching a Carpentry course is that it can increase or deepen your understanding of a subject. A recent instance for me was in using OpenRefine, a tool that runs locally on your machine (you do not have to export your data to a third party service).

• Create a new dataset. It does not modify your original data and keeps provenance of all the steps. Depending on the capabilities of your local machine it can deal with data sets that are up to about 100k rows.

Watch the videos on the OpenRefine website for a good overview. If you want to know more, follow the Carpentry OpenRefine for Ecologists lesson. In this example, I am going to show how easy is to generate a new dataset from the EPCC website. Follow along after you have installed OpenRefine on your system.

Funded by EXDCI-2, EPCC is organising a 2-day workshop in Edinburgh on 8-9 July 2019 to present ideas on how science and engineering can be supported from Raspberry Pis to large scale supercomputers. We are looking to investigate how to introduce these topics to school-age audiences including linking to existing school curricula. This will include examples of existing education materials and activities and looking ahead to current plans.

The Software Sustainability Institute's (SSI) Collaborations Workshop 2019 (CW19) will be held at the West Park Teaching Hub, Loughborough University, Loughborough from 1-3 April 2019. This year the workshop will be themed around topics based on interoperability, documentation, training, and sustainability. Keynote speakers will include Catherine Stihler, CEO of Open Knowledge International, and Franziska Heine (link points to a German article), Head of Software & Development at Wikimedia Deutschland. They will open the event on 1st April.

The MPI Standard states that nonblocking communication operations can be used to “improve performance… by overlapping communication with computation”. This is an important performance optimisation in many parallel programs, especially when scaling up to large systems with lots of inter-process communication.

However, nonblocking operations can also help with making a code correct – without introducing additional dependencies that can degrade performance.

Earlier this year, HPE announced the Catalyst UK programme: a collaboration with Arm, SUSE and three UK universities to deploy one of the largest Arm-based high performance computing (HPC) installations in the world. EPCC was chosen as the site for one of these systems; the other two are the Universities of Bristol and Leicester.

EPCC's system (called 'Fulhame' after pioneering chemist Elizabeth Fulhame) was delivered and installed in early December. This HPE Apollo 70-based system consists of 64 compute nodes with two 32-core Cavium ThunderX2 processors (ie 4096 cores in total), 128GB of memory composed of 16 DDR4 DIMMs, and Mellanox InfiniBand interconnects. It will be made available to both industry and academia, with the aim to build applications that drive economic growth and productivity as outlined in the UK government’s Industrial Strategy.

The meeting was attended by around 50 participants, an interesting mix of researchers, software developers, systems admins and research support/management staff, from the University of Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt University. It is intended to keep these gatherings open to all Higher Education and research institutions of the Edinburgh area.

We are very pleased to have been accepted as a Women in HPC (WHPC) Chapter, a community-level group that fulfils the WHPC mission locally.

EPCC was one of the founders of WHPC, and the introduction of the Chapter and affiliate pilot programme is a source of pride, particularly as this will allow WHPC knowledge, expertise and activities to be tailored to the needs of local HPC communities.